Could A New Stem Cell Therapy Regenerate Damaged Hearts?

Having a heart attack, as I can attest from not just one or just two but three personal experiences with this medical emergency, is an incredibly tiring experience. During the heart attack, if you survive it, you may or may not feel intense chest pain. After the attack, if your heart muscle is damaged, you almost certainly will feel unbelievable fatigue.

And the things you might ordinarily do to help your heart, like taking fish oil, for instance, can make the problem even worse. 

After a Heart Attack, Even Doing the "Right Thing" Sometimes Makes Matters Worse

A heart attack is an interruption of circulation to the heart. When heart cells are deprived of oxygen, they go into a kind of hibernation mode. When the clot that caused the heart attack begins to break up and their oxygen supply is restored, there may be a very brief restoration of heart function, but heart cells quickly tend to "flame out" and die. The surviving tissue of your heart works overtime to keep on pumping blood.

Different parts of the heart fire asynchronously, so that you have irregular heart rhythms. But that's not necessarily the worst possible outcome after surviving a heart attack. Anything that "calms" your heart can shut down struggling heart muscle cells entirely. Heart attack survivors have literally died after making healthy choices in diet and nutritional supplementation. The one thing that could make you better is if somehow a "patch" could be applied to your heart. And that is exactly what stem cell researcher Deepak Srivastava of the University of California recently announced can be done.

"Repairs" to the Heart Have to Fit In Both Anatomically and Electrically

You know that the heart is a complex organ, but you may have no idea about the extent to which this is true. About half of the cells in the heart don't actually pump blood. Called fibroblasts, these cells function as a kind of patch kit for the heart when it is injured. They also form a platform on which the blood-pumping cells known as cardiomyocytes can grow. It is the cardiomyocytes (also known as myocardiocytes) that actually do the work of circulating blood.

It isn't enough to have new cardiomyocytes. These working cells of the heart have to pump in rhythm, the cells at the top of the heart, the atria, firing before the cells at the bottom of the heart, the ventricles, the pattern repeating in the right sequence over and over again. It is the failure of the different parts of the heart to "fire off" in the right sequence that causes disability and sometimes even death after a heart attack. Any kind of patch job to the heart has to be more that just "putty" in the right place in the heart, it also has to fire at the right time in the sequence that powers heartbeat.

Stem Cells for Heart Repair

Dr. Srivastava and his collaborators conducted a number of experiments with fibroblasts from mouse hearts. They found that they could insert three genes into a mouse heart fibroblast, which doesn't "beat," and turn it into a mouse heart myocyte, which has the ability to contribute to the heart's blood pumping ability.

Gene Therapy Transforms Structural Cells into Working Cells

The University of California team then started investigations of using a similar procedure with human heart tissue. Using human fibroblasts, Srivastava and colleagues found that they could insert a different three genes so that human fibroblasts could also be transformed into beating cardiomyocytes. Although they have not been able to "grow a heart in a Petri dish" as some news reports have suggested, this remains an unquestionably remarkable scientific feat.

Dr. Srivastava's technique doesn't promise practical applications in the near future. But the fact is, if you have had a heart attack, it is your own stem cells, created in your own bone marrow and fat, that will repair your heart (to the extent it can be repaired).

If You Have Had a Heart Attack, Does Stem Cell Therapy Hold Out Hope for You?

Without having any kind of medically directed stem cell procedure, I myself have benefited from stem cell repair to my heart. Immediately after my second heart attack, the "tip" of my heart was essentially dead. But just a few weeks after my third heart attack, my entire heart had repaired itself with the help of my own stem cells, so that my entire heart is able to pump blood (just not in perfect rhythm, unfortunately). My body's natural supply of stem cells found their way to my heart to repair the damage done by my heart attacks. 

My experience is hardly unique. Even as adults, our bodies continue to make stem cells that can transform themselves, without any genetic modification, into healthy heart tissue. Whether this happens in time for your survival, however, is not guaranteed, and this is one of the determining factors that go into your odds of surviving a heart attack.

Where Are There Hospitals Doing 

A number of hospitals in the People's Republic of China, in Thailand, and at least one in Israel currently offer different kinds of stem cell treatments, all using your own stem cells, not stem cells from an aborted baby, for treatment of damaged hearts. For treatment at the hospitals, you will have to pay cash in advance, and you will have to travel to the hospital for treatment.

If you are looking for stem cell therapy after heart attack in the USA, however, your best bet, and it's a long shot, is to call the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. A prestigious research institution, the Cleveland Clinic is conducting clinical trials of stem cell therapy either immediately after a heart attack or long after a heart attack with the patient's own stem cells, and treatment weeks or months after a heart attack with donor stem cells.

The treatment is free, although the clinic will not pay patient expenses or compensation for participating in the trial. Not everyone who might benefit from the treatment is accepted to the study, but it may not hurt to ask.